ENG – La Hacienda Creative: Brian D’Oliveira

Could you give us a short introduction to La Hacienda Creative and the team?

La Hacienda Creative is an award winning Music and Sound Design Studio based in Montreal and Toronto. Our dedicated team of composers and sound designers share a passion for exploring new possibilities in sound and pushing limits whenever possible. We strive to use innovative processes, new technologies and unique instruments to craft exceptional audio experiences for film, television and video games.

What inspired the creation of this studio?

La Hacienda was the dream of composer and sound designer Brian D´Oliveira. He wanted to establish a creative space where sound artists and composers could collaborate as storytellers using unique sounds.

La Hacienda Creative – Photo: Carlos Lerios

La Hacienda Creative – Photo: Carlos Lerios

La Hacienda Creative – Photo: Carlos Lerios

La Hacienda Creative – Photo: Carlos Lerios

We noticed there’s a lot of exotic and world instruments, why do you keep collecting those?

At La Hacienda the idea of using as many ‘real’ sounds and instruments as possible is a huge part of our creative philosophy. Not only is it by nature unique, but it allows us to create more efficiently, thereby keeping the instinctive creation process active, in comparison to most DAW-centric audio production that is, nowadays, the norm.

What are the biggest challenges you have faced during all these years ?

Building the space was a huge challenge, but it now works beautifully as a multi-studio facility that is able to work modularly depending on the kind of projects that we are doing.

La Hacienda Creative – Photo: Carlos Lerios

Did you meet people who influenced you and played an important role as mentors ?

There are too many to mention. Although there is a consensus among all at LaHa that a very important influence in all the work we do is to be conscious of the work of the great masters of the past and of the ancient traditions from where music originally came from.

What are your plans for the next months?

We are doing some amazing creative projects that, regrettably, we cannot announce yet since it’s all top secret.

As we know, there’s a debate around analog gear, what are your thoughts on analog vs. digital? Does it influence your creative process ?

We are in a sense pre-analog in our approach since we strive to use as many real instruments as possible ( though we definitely enjoy our analog gear! ). A lot of the time we will use real instrumental sources and use a combination of analogue and digital processing to get ‘synthesized sounds’.

La Hacienda Creative – Photo: Carlos Lerios

Any news you would like to share or something else you would like to add?

There seems to be a lot of focus placed on having limitless ´toys´ and sounds, and for the most part a lot of people by default use DAW´s and Grid based production as a starting point. So, in a sense, imposing ´creative limitations´ can be a big source of inspiration, regardless of whether it’s electronic or acoustic based production. So we would encourage everybody out there to at least try to use some ´real´ instruments and actually PLAY your parts from beginning to end, not just copy and paste parts or phrases.